"I felt guilty for not being able to help my students more."
Just over a year ago, I was with my 8th-grade students in a rural school, working on our Synthesis course. We were about 600 km from home, without masks, social distancing, or webcams. Isolated as we were from the news that was coming in, the little we saw about the coronavirus (we weren't yet calling it COVID-19) made us smile and dismiss the alarmists as exaggerators. We arrived back in our city ready to resume our urban lives. However, our return to the classroom lasted only four days: the following Thursday, the order was given to close schools for 15 days.
At first, both students and teachers took those days as a test, an anecdote to remember over the years, but the 15 days were extended until the end of the school year due to the health crisis and the situation had to be faced, investing a lot of time and effort from everyone, which caused our mental health to break down.
I remember that, once we accepted that the new normal would be virtual classes, my days were always the same: getting up in the morning, checking the new emails I had received while I was sleeping, answering the urgent ones, teaching the day's sessions online, holding teleconferences (teaching teams, staff meetings, with colleagues in the department…), answering the remaining emails from the morning and the new ones received during the day, calling families to find out about their situation, correcting students' assignments and proposing new challenges, researching online resources, helping and being helped with computer problems… and I would go to sleep checking my inbox one last time.
This was my life for a few weeks, from Monday to Sunday. And it was until my partner started noticing that I was more irritable, always tired, not sleeping well, and always connected to what was happening in Classroom.
I had to stop and take a step back to be able to give my best professionally : I set work hours for myself (only breaking them for emergencies), added physical exercise in my living room to my daily routine, and had to learn to say "no" to the scheduling demands of colleagues who were juggling distance teaching with helping their children with their schoolwork at home. In addition, I rediscovered my hobbies (watching movies and series, playing video games, reading, cooking, etc.) and spent more quality time with my partner.
Although the change was good for me, I often felt guilty for believing I couldn't do everything (which I now see was impossible), for not being able to give enough attention to all my students, for not being able to help them more. Every failing grade and every unsubmitted assignment hurt more than in high school, because it was proof that I was letting them down.
Luckily, in September we returned to in-person classes, with a different class and students, in my case, and eager to leave online classes behind. But we returned with fear and uncertainty. Would the health measures be enough? Would we get infected? Would we infect others? Faced with this uncertainty, both my partner and I greatly reduced contact with our social circle so as not to harm anyone, and we experienced a lot of anxiety during the first weeks of "back to school" with the data on infected students, classes in quarantine, tests to be carried out… mostly because we didn't know when we would have to go through it and what the consequences would be.
Like everything in life, adapting to it is a learning process. After several quarantines for students, teachers, and myself, we've learned to live with the pandemic in the classroom, to return to a more normal school rhythm, and above all, to refocus on the teenagers who spend so many hours at school.
Teenagers during lockdown and post-lockdown
The lockdown and the easing of restrictions were a very difficult ordeal for everyone, but I was able to see that for teenagers and pre-teens it may have been even more so. At an age when they begin to gain independence from their families and have more contact with friends, their first romantic relationships… they found themselves isolated from all of that and confined.
While they were unable to go outside, most stayed in touch with their friends through social media and during online classes. It was interesting to observe how some habitual truants didn't miss a single hour or submitted most of their assignments. However, the lockdown left those without a computer, mobile phone, internet access, or electricity at home even more isolated.
Once the de-escalation phases began, those who had already turned 14 could meet up in the mornings. They got up very early to make the most of their four hours of freedom (from 6:00 to 10:00), since they weren't allowed out during the night. From then on, some abandoned distance learning to reconnect with their friends. Thirteen-year-olds, on the other hand, could only stay in touch with their friends through social media, since their curfew was different (and they had to be accompanied).
In September, the full extent of their suffering became clear. Most were eager to return to the classroom. Some, in fact, have improved their attendance this year. The widespread joy at being reunited contrasted sharply with the visible sadness of those who had lost family members in the preceding months. There was also discomfort among those who felt panicked about the virus (not only individually, but also because some communities have not yet normalized their return to classrooms for this reason) or who had made their rooms their refuge, away from so many people and noise.
The school year has brought everyone back to routines that in some cases had been forgotten or neglected, to living with many people again, to continuing their development as social beings, with all the arguments and disputes to resolve. And for some, it has given them back their safe space, where they feel secure and valued.
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